A forest or woodland is an area covered by trees. Two different tags are used to describe this: natural=wood and landuse=forest. There are major differences in the way these are used by some OpenStreetMap mappers.

Situation is complicated as different people advocate different, conflicting tagging schemes.

Depending on region there may or may not be difference between areas tagged as natural=wood and landuse=forest. Difference, if any, depends on who mapped the area. As result nearly all data consumers treat both natural=wood and landuse=forest as synonymous tags for a forested area.

Approach 2

Note that visiting location is not enough, checking whatever land is managed for forestry requires more extensive research and many people marking forests are not interested in spending time on tagging distinction between managed and unmanaged forest.

Tag managed=* is very rarely used (less than 6500 instances in database [2])

Approach 3

landuse=forest is used for maintained or managed woodland. This approach views most woodland as managed or maintained especially in areas such as Europe.

natural=wood is used for ancient or virgin woodland, with no forestry use.

Approach 4

wood=yes is used to mark the presence of trees. Use of wood=* is deprecated for indicating vegetation types but wood=yes is still used. It is however fairly uncommon (less than 1000 instances in database [3]).

Approach 5

landcover=trees is used to mark the presence of trees. It does not imply the use nor origin of the trees. Note that this tag is rarely used tag for wooded areas (less than 65000 instances in database [4]) compared to overall use of natural=wood and landuse=forest tags.

Forest tagged by mapper unable/uninterested in making distinction between managed and unmanaged forest would be ignored by typical data consumers. As result people are unlikely to start using this scheme.

Is fairly uncommon.

Approach 5

landcover=trees is not common and rarely supported by data consumers. As result either original mapper or somebody editing later in a given region will use other approach - instead or in addition to.

Approach 6

Does not distinguish between landuse=forest, natural=wood. As result it is disliked by people that would prefer these tags to have a different meaning.

General problem with this tagging scheme

When mapping from aerial or satellite images is usually very difficult to determine if a woodland area is used for forestry. This can be difficult even for the observer on the ground. As result people de facto use landuse=forest and natural=wood fairly arbitrarily.

As result tagging schemes that rely on differences between natural=woodlanduse=forest are problematic. For a given area it is complicated to guess tagging scheme used by the original mapper. It is nearly impossible to do it automatically, at least there are no known tools doing this. As result other mappers and data consumers are unable to use data that was intended to be added by selecting natural=wood or landuse=forest.

Rendering

For a given area it is impossible to guess what kind of tagging scheme was used by the original mapper, so in practice both natural=wood and landuse=forest are typically interpreted as "area covered by trees".

On maps forests are typically a green area.
When leaf_type=* is set one may show little broad leaved or coniferous (or both) icons.